In what is a first for Marvell, the new DragonFly VSA, which plugs directly into all commercially available servers with a PCIe slot, combines Marvell's chip technology with its newly designed circuit boards. The result is a systems solution that is designed to achieve 10x server I/O performance, while reducing power, space and storage capital costs in the datacenter. The DragonFly VSA is also suited for virtualized server applications, which have become hugely popular in the enterprise.

The DragonFly VSA represents an entirely new architecture in the industry, achieving the benefits of virtualization scaling and enterprise NAS/SAN/DAS storage cost reduction via turn-key hardware.

"Addressing the issue of I/O bottlenecks in the enterprise is a real problem facing many data center managers," said Jeff Janukowicz, research manager for Solid State Storage Technologies at IDC. "A turn-key system solution, such as Marvell's DragonFly Virtual Storage Accelerator, that combines silicon with additional hardware in an industry standard PCIe card that addresses these performance concerns is an innovation that will be welcomed by many enterprise storage customers."

The DragonFly VSA is a purpose-built, turn-key solution that is designed to provide benefits to enterprise data centers (private clouds) and hosted service providers (public clouds). Powered by HyperScale embedded technology, the Marvell DragonFly VSA enables cloud computing deployments to break through the storage I/O barrier by enabling 10x virtual server IOPS while lowering NAS/SAN/DAS storage costs by 50 percent or more. The DragonFly VSA enables the creation of a next-generation cloud-optimized data center architecture where data is automatically cached in a low-latency, high-bandwidth "host I/O cache" in application servers on its way to/from higher-latency, higher-capacity storage. The DragonFly VSA is designed to create a host I/O write and read cache that is agnostic to storage protocols and can be configured as a data cache for NAS, SAN or DAS storage arrays.

The DragonFly VSA's distributed host I/O cache employs a two-level cache for very low-latency and high burst throughput. The two levels are composed of a level-1 non-volatile random access memory (NVRAM) cache and a level-2 cache created from off-the-shelf commodity SSD drives. The two-level cache enables consistent, high-level performance to applications running on the host server.
As an industry standard PCIe adapter, the DragonFly VSA offers a turn-key "appliance-on-a-card" that fits into all commercially available rack-mount servers and is operating system independent. By offering an add-on card to commodity servers, the DragonFly VSA enables a cost-effective distributed host cache that incrementally scales IOPS and NVRAM/SSD capacity as your application servers grow over time.

Powered by embedded HyperScale technology, Marvell DragonFly VSA is designed to offer the following features for cloud computing storage deployments: